Forget the calendar. I'll tell you when spring arrived in these parts:
precisely at 7:15 p.m. April 3, 2008, when Fernando Rodriguez threw the
first pitch of the Arkansas Travelers' season at Dickey-Stephens Stadium in
North Little Rock, Ark. It was a ball.

Let a John Updike write rapturously about that "lyric little bandbox of a
ball park" up in Boston called Fenway in one of his star turns ("Hub Fans
Bid Kid Adieu") for The New Yorker circa 1960. But this perfect little retro
park alongside the Arkansas River has a still new charm of its own.

Still unhallowed by time, unscarred by much history, waiting to grow on us,
this little jewel of a Texas League ballpark is like any other one-year-old,
absorbing all the love and adulation grateful fans can offer. It has the one
thing none of the storied old major-league parks can offer: It's ours.

For as Chesterton once wrote of an otherwise unprepossessing English mill
town, we do not love our city because it is lovely, but because it is ours,
and therefore we determine to make it lovely.

It's still 20 minutes before game time this lovely spring evening with rain
only in the forecast. There is no milling throng at the gate. Maybe the talk
of rain kept folks at home.

But the crowd begins to swell and jell after a while, and the sense of
anticipation is the same as on every other opening night. It hits you when
you get your first, elevated, electrifying glimpse of the green, green
field. Is there any other shade of green so young and hopeful as that of a
ballpark under the lights opening night?

All over the country, others are having the same opening night high. In a
hundred ballparks, major and minor, at home and away, old men dream dreams
and young men see visions. Up north in Springdale, Ark., they're not just
opening the season but their new stadium, home of the mouth-filling
Northwest Arkansas Naturals. I'm so glad the state's poultry capital didn't
pick a name like the Fighting Chickens. (Was it Richard Nixon whom an
over-enthusiastic admirer once dubbed the Fighting Quaker?)

All thought of politics and other dross drops away like the years, left
behind at the office, as a big black man in a blindingly white frock coat
steps up to home plate like steel-drivin' John Henry. He is there to sing
the national anthem in a voice that needs no amplification. In a magnificent
basso profundo, Mr. Isom Kelly rolls out the anthem like an all-encompassing
banner waving high over the park in the restive wind.

The ballplayers, caps over hearts, line up patriotically along the first and
third base lines in stiff rows. Only the Travs' No. 15 swings and sways a
little to the star-spangled music, unable to help himself. It's a tribute to
the music of the night, to the return of spring, to The Game.

Once again the ritual is under way. And I hear myself murmuring the

Shehecheyanu, the Hebrew blessing said on
holidays and festivals: Blessed be the Lord our God, King of
the Universe, who has preserved us in life, sustained us, and allowed us to
reach this season. Thank you, Lord, for letting me make another
opening night.

What a voice the frock-coated Mr. Kelly has. It matches his outfit:
majestic. They can hear him out on the berm behind the outfield fence where
families have spread their picnic blankets, and over in the beer garden
along the right-field line where the smokers are quarantined, and high up in
the little skyboxes, which still seem like an imperial imposition on this
most republican of sports.

The game's carefully delineated lines stretch from perfectly pentagonal home
plate past the carefully circumscribed diamond of an infield into eternity.
Such is the vision: An aristocracy of merit arising out of the
rough-and-tumble of equal opportunity. Like it says on the dollar bill, a
New Order of the Ages.

After the first sip of cold draft, the first bite of hot dog, the first look
up at the Little Rock skyline across the river, and beyond that the dark,
dark night sky, the world seems like a mighty fine place. Everything is as
it should be. It's spring, the stars and planets move in their celestial
order, the universe testifies to the elegant grace of time, and you're at
the very center of it.

War, famine, pestilence, death, all that editorial grist, have been left
behind. The Game envelops all. Time itself dissolves, for theoretically a
tied baseball game could go on forever.

Who won, who lost? The score is Midland (Tex.) Rockhounds 3, Arkansas
Travelers 2 when the game is called on account of a tornado in the eighth.
(How do you mark that on the scorecard?) One minute you're deep into
admiration for a perfect play in a perfect world, the next you're dodging a
tornado. That's Arkansas. That's life. All the sweeter for being so
fleeting. The moral of the story: Be sure to enjoy the game before it's
called.